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Saturday, June 21, 2014

...in which I check my ankles for ticks, on Staten Island. I had been walking in the long grasses, roadside. And yes, I wore white pants on purpose - to spot them, fast.

The tick thing isn't funny. They are tiny. And they transmit diseases with large consequences: Lyme disease, babebiosis, ehrlichiosis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, anaplasmosis and the rare but virulent Powassan encephalitis.

We are drenched in spray for mosquitoes that transmit the occasional bite of West Nile virus, but the ticks, that affect thousands of people, march on (although there is now a senate-convened Tick Task Force). The Frenchman and I tire of the threat, neither of us having grown up in tick-plagued countries.

This really was not going to be a tick post

But there is no part of the great Northeastern outdoors that is free of their threat. Except, perhaps, for this pocket of Staten Island, where not a single tick did we find.

I did find beautiful common milkweed, whose flowers were just beginning to open. I picked about 25 flowerheads from the hundreds, for a lavender-colored cordial.

If you have a garden, or own land, consider planting milkweed. Asclepias syriaca is the only one - that we know of - that is deliciously edible for humans (shoots, buds, flowers and pods). But plant any of the over 100 species of Asclepias on which monarch butterfly larvae feed.

Botanical Interests sells Aslepias incarnata seed. The plants are perennial, so wait two years after sowing to see your flowers bloom. Glover Perennials on Long Island's North Fork propagates and sells (wholesale) milkweed plants, so ask your Tri-state nursery to stock their products. You can order milkweed plants online, too.

The only way to spread milkweed is to demand it or to broadcast the fluff from the seed pods, when you find it. Most of it falls victim to roadside and railside herbicide spraying, and most farmers consider it a pest, like the one on whose land I was permitted to collect the shoots in May.

This Staten Island common milkweed colony (they rise from an underground series of rhizomes) is threatened by the relentless crush of invasive and exotic - and edible! - mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), which dominates the green area.

I doubt these acts of milkweed planting that I advocate will save the threatened monarch, whose forests far, far south have been depleted by logging (read Barbara Kingsolver'sFlight Behavior - whose rather dismissive review I will never forget, on NPR, the reviewer questioning the monarch hook around which the novel is written, as rather - I am paraphrasing - esoteric and inconsequential).

I live in north Texas and have two milkweeds in my town garden, swamp milkweed and tuberosa. I was delighted to see hundreds of milkweed on my greenbelt walk last week. I gained an immense appreciation for milkweed as a host to many insects through the local native plant society. I am thrilled to know about B. Kingsolver's book. I love her. She always strikes a chord in me.

Yes yes yes on the milkweed planting! I grow two species - Asclepias incarnata and Asclepias tuberosa, the latter in two varieties - in the Michigan garden and let them seed pretty much wherever they want. I can hardly think of a better summer perennial. They are tidy, pest and disease free, flower for weeks and weeks even in the Midwestern heat, and draw lots of butterflies. And every time I find a monarch caterpillar I am just delighted! They rarely seem to come more than two or three to a sizeable plant, so unlike other caterpillars they do not even leave particularly conspicuous damage.

I am very grateful that you mentioned ticks. The diseases they transmit should be taken extremely seriously. Guinea fowl are a natural foe to ticks as they eat them. I believe that individuals and municipalities should invest in the Guinea fowl to try to eradicate ticks. In addition, it would be cute to see Guinea fowl in our parks.

In House Blogs

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We have art, Nietzsche said, so that we shall not be destroyed by the truth.

Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero

How will we know it's us without our past?

...How'll it be not to know what land's outside the door? How if you wake up in the night and know - and know the willow tree's not there? Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no, you can't. The willow tree is you.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath.

Necessity knows no magic formulae - they are all left to chance. If a love is to be unforgettable, fortuities must immediately start fluttering down to it like birds to Francis of Assissi's shoulders.

Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I equate happiness with contentment, and contentment with complacency, and complacency with impending disaster.

Afterwards in the street, she looks around the neighborhood. "Yes, it is certified now."

She refers to a phenomenon of moviegoing which I have called certification. Nowadays when a person lives somewhere, in a neighborhood, the place is not certified for him. More than likely he will live there sadly and the emptiness which is inside him will expand until it evacuates the entire neighborhood. But if he sees a movie which shows his very neighborhood, it becomes possible for him to live, for a time at least, as a person who is Somewhere and not Anywhere."

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy

The garden paths were lit by coloured lamps, as is the custom in Italy, and the supper table was laden with candles and flowers, as is the custom in all countries where they understand how to dress a table, which when properly done is the rarest of all luxuries.

Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo

One of the new things people began to find out in the last century was that thoughts - just mere thoughts - are as powerful as electric batteries, as good for one as sunlight is, or as bad for one as poison.

Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Mrs Cadwallader to Dorothea)

"I know it's a great temptation to go mad, but don't go in for it, you wouldn't like it."

George Eliot, Middlemarch

"A is for dining Alone...and so am I, if a choice must be made between most people I know and myself. This misanthropic attitude is one I am not proud of, but it is firmly there, based on my ever-increasing conviction that sharing food with another human being is an act that should not be indulged in lightly."

MFK Fisher, The Art of Eating

What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran with them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardenthearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.

Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years. I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.

Richard Chaston (1620-1695). Chaston wrote that men and fairies both contain within them a faculty of reason and a faculty of magic. In men reason is strong and magic is weak. With fairies it is the other way round: magic comes very naturally to them, but by human standards they are barely sane.

Susanna Clark, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell

No method nor discipline can supersede the necessity of being forever on the alert. What is a course of history or philosophy, or poetry, no matter how well selected, or the best society, or the most admirable routine of life compared with the discipline of looking always at what is to be seen?